How To Use Facebook's Timeline For Marketing

You can advance your business by enabling Facebook's timeline on your profile and posting content that promotes your brand.

You can advance your business by enabling Facebook’s timeline on your profile and posting content that promotes your brand.

Only those who have installed Facebook’s Developer application on their profiles can see timelines as of this writing, but sometime soon they will become visible to all users of the site.

Make A Billboard

The cover is a big banner image that appears at the top of the Timeline profile. It’s the first thing people will see when they visit your profile so it can be used to promote your brand or distribute a message.

This space is roughly 840 pixels wide by 310 pixels tall. Images smaller than this will get expanded, and that can degrade the image’s quality. If you create a graphic that’s too large, Facebook prompts you to select a portion of the image to become the cover.

Use Photoshop, Skitch, GIMP, Paint or another image editor to create an image that’s the same size as the available space.

Then add some combination of the following promotional elements:

The logo and name of your business

A slogan or tagline

Pictures of you, your products or team

The address of your website

The name or vanity address of your Facebook page

The elements you choose and your design should depend on your audience. Your friends or potential customers might be turned off if your marketing is too aggressive. The more professional contacts you have on your friend list, the more promotional you’ll want to make your cover.

Note that you can’t embed any active links in your cover; instead, spell out web addresses in visually compelling fashion to get fans to remember your brand. You might want to include a call to action to visit your page, website or Twitter feed.

Each time you add or edit a cover, Facebook saves it for you in an album called “covers.” You can find this folder among your image albums and add website addresses as captions or in the comments section — but consider that optional because most of your friends probably won’t bother checking out this folder.

Once you finish designing your cover, mouse over the cover space on your profile and click the the “change cover” button. That prompts you to upload your image and then arrange it so it shows up in the right place on your timeline.

Once that’s taken care of, you’ll want to share branded content, which now posts on your timeline. It shows all important content you’ve posted to Facebook ever since your first created an account. However, you can select what should remain visible.

Look right below the cover and you see a link called “view activity.” Click on it and you can: